Mr George Adam Sukoco S. (p), Mr Ariel Hardiyanto, Dr. Reynaldi Hermansjah, Dr. I Kadek Dian Sutrisna Artha (p)

Infrastructure plays a vital role in improving productivity and accessibility, lowering logistics costs, facilitating trade, and attracting investment. Nevertheless, local governments in Indonesia face substantial fiscal and regulatory constraints that impede infrastructure development. Conventional financing sources—such as central government transfers and regional budgets (APBD)—often fail to keep pace with the growing demand for infrastructure investment. Recent policy reducing intergovernmental fiscal transfers has further limited the capacity of local governments to independently fund infrastructure projects. In response, PT Sarana Multi Infrastruktur (PT SMI), a state-owned enterprise under the Ministry of Finance, offers a range of financial instruments—including subnational loans, blended finance, and public-private partnerships (PPP)—as alternative solutions to help bridge the infrastructure financing gap. Among these instruments are low-interest subnational loans for infrastructure development under the National Economic Recovery (PEN) program, which were disbursed during the COVID-19 pandemic. This paper seeks to assess the impact of PEN loans on regional capital expenditure using a staggered difference-in-differences (DID) approach, followed by a fixed effects model linking capital spending to regional economic growth. The DID analysis employs a panel dataset constructed from PT SMI’s internal data, regional financial reports, and datasets obtained from the Central Bureau of Statistics. The treatment group comprises regions that received PEN loans, while the control group includes regions that did not receive such loans during the study period. In addition, this study investigates implementation challenges and proposes policy recommendations for innovative infrastructure financing. Specifically, it addresses the following questions: (1) To what extent do creative financing mechanisms influence capital spending? and (2) How is local capital spending associated with changes in regional economic growth and revenue? As Indonesia restructures its regional financing framework through the implementation of a new statute governing central-regional fiscal relations (UU HKPD & PP HKFN), this research provides timely, policy-relevant evidence on how innovative public financing schemes can support economic growth and the country’s structural transformation in the years ahead.

This article examines a proposition now widely discussed in the social sciences: space and time are not the exclusive domains of geography and history, but fundamental dimensions of any socio‑economic analysis. Every social system occupies a space, forms a specific configuration, and transforms over time. Spatialities and temporalities are therefore not simply descriptive frameworks; they constitute the very phenomena and deeply shape their dynamics across political economy, sociology, and political science.
Investment, for instance, involves a spatial sequence: a localized concentration of resources followed by returning flows. Yet mainstream economics typically abstracts investment into a mere numerical magnitude. Keynesian theory also rests on an implicit national spatiality organized hierarchically, without explicitly recognizing this spatial form.
These examples highlight a methodological issue: economic theories rarely make explicit the spatial and temporal forms embedded in their conceptual frameworks. They often blur distinctions between concrete space and metaphorical space.
Indeed, in the field of thought, spatial forms play a subtle but essential role. The social sciences rely on spatial metaphors — networks, flows, scales, hierarchical levels, bases, anchors — to represent and explain social and economic processes.
To clarify these issues, the article mobilizes the combinatorial and hierarchical language of Q analysis (Atkin 1974; Johnson 1991; Holtier 1992), derived from set theory and graph theory. This formalism offers a systematic description of the spatial forms of economic phenomena. The goal is twofold: to describe the spatial and temporal configurations of concrete economic processes, and to reveal the spatial forms underlying economic theories themselves.
The first part revisits how equilibrium‑based approaches progressively neutralized space and time (Corpataux & Crevoisier 2007), shaping the discipline’s relation to spatiality.
The second part examines the renewed interest in territorial dynamics in the 1980s–1990s with the rise of innovation issues. New models — innovative milieus, industrial districts, technopoles — showed that innovation is territorially embedded, rooted in region‑specific resources within globalization (Moulaert & Sekia 2003). Territorial differentiation thus appears as a key strategy for survival, allowing regions to rebuild competitiveness through innovation when price competition fails.
Since the 1990s, the generalization of mobility has required conceptual tools articulating both mobility and anchoring of knowledge, labor, capital, and, later, consumers. Finally, the article discusses development processes shaped by movements “from above” and “from below,” unfolding through scale dynamics and internationalization, underscoring the need to jointly consider spatial forms, temporalities, and structural transformations.

Ms Alexandra Pintilie (p), Franziska Sielker

European industrial regions experience stark changes in their development on their way to achieve twin transition goals. In non-metropolitan regions with anchor firms, governing transition policy is inherently intertwined with the outlook of these individual companies. As such the paper revisits the role of anchor firms and associated governance structures in these regional industrial transition processes. More precisely, the paper’s objective is to advance an understanding of how the role of anchor firms shifts in light of the new challenges of contemporary industrial transitions.
Building on a literature review of anchor firms complemented by theoretical insights from transitions studies and the field of new industrial policies, the paper develops an analytical framework operationalising the mechanisms and functioning of anchor companies to allow for an empirical analysis. Conceptually, the existing literature on anchor firms focusses mainly on the shifts in the composition of local economic outcomes, anchor’s embeddedness in innovation and production networks, as well as industrial path creation processes. To revisit how these mechanisms change and what mechanisms gain importance during industrial transition processes, we then apply this analytical framework and its dimensions in two explorative empirical case studies. Drawing on the case study work conducted as part of the ESPON NoStaGeo project, focusing on regions in the process of industrial transition, the paper presents the operationalisation of the theoretical arguments in an analytical framework by comparing them with arguments stemming from the Norrbotten region, Sweden, and Carinthia, Austria.
We argue that, by including insights from transition studies and new industrial policies, further aspects of the strategic role anchor firms play in decision-making networks ultimately shaping regional developments can be explored. In contrast to the discourse on incumbent firms, prevalent in the field of transition studies, this offers a more nuanced understanding of those companies that function as the backbone of their respective regional economies. Regions with anchor companies become arenas where transformation efforts, industrial policy, and territorial development unfold.